


Bewitched

by lawlessearth



Category: Lovecraft Country (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode 8, F/F, Leading up to Episode 9, Missing Scene, Ruby-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27677032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lawlessearth/pseuds/lawlessearth
Summary: Ruby comes to terms with Christina.
Relationships: Ruby Baptiste/Christina Braithwhite
Comments: 18
Kudos: 100





	Bewitched

**Author's Note:**

> My attempt to address the transition from Ruby confronting Christina about her indifference and privilege and her announcing to everybody that Christina would help Dee for her.

The grandfather clock in the corner ticked slowly. Ruby stared at it with a kind of numbness that was in her limbs and organs. Seconds passed by, then minutes, and without realizing it, she had an hour of perfect solitude. She didn’t even notice. This house with its old, stately furnishings had an uncanny way of swallowing time. All she knew was that, after their confrontation, Christina had left. The distant crunching of gravel under the wheels of her silver Bentley, the only sendoff.

It was another half hour when Ruby finally moved from the parlor. By then, the sun was already at a low angle in the sky, signifying late afternoon. She ought to go back, she thought. She ought to go upstairs, grab her purse and leave the way she came. What had possessed her to come anyway? The strain of her anguish had followed her so permanently she had to keep moving. But she had no sensation of deciding, no awareness that her feet had led her here. Back to William. Back to _her_.

Ruby remembered standing outside the iron gates, not knowing what she was looking for or why. A neighbor had seen her but before his belligerence could escalate, the familiar flash of silver had appeared.

Oh, Christina had played the part well. Stepping out of the car in his body, face a perfect mask of worry, blue gaze honing in on Ruby as though she understood the turmoil the other felt. _“Is there a problem?”_ William had asked the neighbor though his eyes held hers. And the tears had come before Ruby was even aware of them.

Behind closed doors, the figure of William had been unspeaking ( _His words are mine_ , Christina had said to her that time in earnest) but his hands had trembled, as had his lips. And Ruby had ached - how she had ached. Comfort, Ruby had told herself, that was what she would take from him. _Love_ , the thought had fleeted briefly. Or perhaps the imitation of it. Because now that she knew, Ruby couldn’t help but see Christina looking out of William’s eyes. It was her hands encircling the expanse of her back, cradling her face, touching her forehead to hers, silent and restrained. It was her seeking her lips. And Ruby, in desire, amid grief and confusion, answered.

What did that say about her?

_“You took that potion because you wanted to hide from the fact that even on today of all days you were a woman who wanted what she wanted,”_ Christina had laid it out for her with quiet savagery.

It was a defining characteristic of both personas, Ruby was beginning to realize. William, perhaps owing to his role and function, was more of a dilettante in social niceties so it wasn’t obvious. But Christina - she had not grace enough to pretend. She barely tolerated anything that had not come within her vision.

_“I don’t care about Emmett Till,”_ she’d said with a complete lack of sentiment.

The shock of it had stunned Ruby into stillness.

_“I don’t care about Roy Bryant or J. W. Millam who’ll never see justice for what they did. I don’t care that half the city’s on the brink because of it and I don’t think that you really do either.”_

It was nature’s irony that the light from outside should fall on her the way it had, turning her hair into a halo, revealing the sweet curve of cheek, the arch of her brow. Her gaze had held an expression that Ruby thought nostalgic but didn’t recognize.

_“Pain. It’s like being unmade. That’s what you said about the transformation. But that’s not what I saw when I was fucking you.”_ Christina’s voice, low and half-whispering, seemed to slide along each nerve of Ruby’s body. _“I saw someone being reborn.”_

Ruby had not realized she’d been holding her breath until Christina sidestepped her and strode out of the room.

* * *

The house was silent as Ruby made her way upstairs. She entered the bedroom. The drapes remained drawn but the sheets on the bed had been changed. The slough and gore of their metamorphoses were nowhere to be seen. The only evidence of what had transpired was the single drop of blood on the hardwood floor beneath the full-length mirror. She did not know whose blood it was – William’s or Hillary’s.

Ruby screwed up her eyes to the ghost of her reflection. The numbness she felt turned to fatigue. When she sank into the bed, the scent of dried herbs rose up from the bedclothes. She wanted to sleep, but her eyelids were flickering too much. Her mind remained clear. Though she had little idea of time, the burned images of the past few hours lived in her memory with static clarity. She saw Bobo’s sweet little face as she remembered him and the rotting, putrid monster that was in the open casket; William’s soft, beautiful lips in profile as she fell asleep in his arms and the disorienting vision of Christina, hair stringy and face blood-red, rising from the foot of the bed. No social smile or conversational suggestion, just a contemplative stare as she shrugged on her robe and made for the bathroom.

What followed was the rawest and most vicious that Ruby had ever felt.

* * *

Once, Ruby thought she lived a pretty mundane existence. The lines of her life included holding two jobs and her Mama’s hair while she puked into the bedpan. Leti’s desperate phone calls from across State lines and the criticism of Marvin. Riots and social unrest. Trying not to drink yet keeping an endless check on her audience lest management won’t let her sing a second night. A planned night out at Denmark Vesey’s; a snatched hour backstage studying for an exam at secretarial school. Her clothes, her work, her flat she shared with three or four others. Chicago’s 75-degree summers, the wail of traffic through the park, simple Sunday services that issued into jovial meetings outside church that seemed to last an hour too long. And the sense of a larger life inside her, excited and confirmed by the pictures she saw in galleries, people she met singing at a club next town over, the sensuous load of sounds and pictures in cinema; something unfulfilled, something needing to be understood.

Sometimes she went away on her own to unfamiliar streets, further north than anyone from the Southside ever ventured. There she walked or sat without the distraction of company or conversation. She didn’t feel self-pity because she could see nothing to feel sorry for; the routine concerns and preoccupations of her life were interesting to her. She liked living alone, she liked being alone. But at the end of a particularly long, grueling weekend, she did want to talk to someone.

Once, a boy of no more than twenty, came up to her after her set while Sammy, wiping glasses behind the bar, pretended not to hear. She was wearing some bold ensemble, sequins and all. He had dark eyes and an unconvincing beard. He was awkward with her at first, told her he was new to the city, hadn’t made any friends yet. But after a few beers, he began to relax and Ruby found him charming enough, respectful enough. At least, he took her arm with clumsy caution outside the door to her apartment, his eyes seeking permission. She let him in and he was grateful and excited. It lasted a few weeks until one morning when he didn’t want to talk to her anymore, when he wanted to be somewhere else, be with somebody else. 

Once, Letitia told her she had their mother’s tenderness. She fell in love too easily. Ruby responded by saying Leti’s sincerity was very often just another way of bullshitting in earnest. After all, her baby sister never had to cope with a family that very openly preferred her and her flights of fancy over Ruby who worked the summer she had a growth spurt to contribute to the family coffers and never stopped. Yes, she was kindly and, yes, she was good, but she’d had to be. Being as non-threatening as possible – what people saw as her “gentleness” - was the currency with which she navigated her life.

Then, she met William. He of the burning blue eyes staring at her from across the bar. She expected to be patronized, plied with drinks and offered the world. He did all that and meant more, so much more. Nothing could have prepared her for it. Or the deception that went a lot deeper than words and promises.

Ruby still felt the horror of watching Christina emerge from William’s gaping jaw as his skin burst and fell all over the floor. Even with magic, nothing she had foreseen, nothing she had dreamed of could have bodied forth the shape and taste of this latter revelation. Christina, whose restrained intensity both fascinated and repulsed Ruby, whose loaded words stoked the flames of rage seething inside her all this time. She stood in front of her, naked and without shame, unrecoiling under the fury of her disappointment.

(Later, in the spectacle of Ruby’s need and frustration, Christina would reveal to her exactly how little she valued people’s regard.)

Unmitigated freedom, that was what she said. What she really offered was a life without lines, without the little concerns, the responsibilities that had so defined Ruby’s existence all her life. To live right on the edges, belonging nowhere, belonging to no one but to one’s self.

Could she bear such solitude? Could anyone?

Ruby climbed off the bed. Her hands were shaking like Hillary’s every time she transformed back into herself. She breathed in deeply, hearing the air catch in her chest. It seemed to her extraordinary that she should be feeling the pain and shock now, when she was fully herself and comfortable in her own skin.

(She had been stripped bare. Her bones had been exposed.)

The thought of home stirred her. But home was not Leti’s house or Hippolyta’s apartment or that crowded old flat a couple of blocks away from Sammy’s. Home was not even the place where Eloise Baptiste spent most of her last days, pining over her younger daughter who was miles away and who made sure to keep that distance between them.

Her shoes echoed on the uncarpeted wooden steps as she went down, coatless, her purse in one hand, into the large hall. When she reached the threshold, the front door opened and closed with a bang. Ruby heaved her shoulders up, then let them drop in a long, broken sigh. She felt as she often did for the first few minutes in her presence, unsettled yet transfixed.

Christina stood in front of her. Absurdly and inexplicably, she was soaked from head to toe.

* * *

Once, Eloise had put on a bootleg copy of _Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered_ on the gramophone. It wasn’t the Doris Day version, popular a few years back, but the one by Vivienne Segal from the original Broadway production of Pal Joey during Act I, Scene 6. Ruby was not old enough then to understand what the song was about but she remembered repeating the words of the song title, enjoying how they rolled in her tongue and how the sound vibrated in her ears.

* * *

Christina didn’t speak at once. Her eyes, almond-shaped and thickly lashed, were shadowed by the night. It wasn’t late by any means but it was also already past dinner time. She stood very still as she had in the parlor earlier that day when Ruby went on the attack. But unlike this morning, she appeared pale and altered, even shivering a little.

There were limits to the invulnerability spell, Christina told her once. It protected her from harm’s way but it didn’t stop her body from experiencing ordinary sensations. She was still human.

“You’re leaving.” There was a strange catch in her voice that wasn’t there before.

“You’re wet,” Ruby returned, moving a shoulder back. “What the hell happened?”

Christina half-rolled her eyes, mouth turned down. “Nothing I didn’t choose for myself,” she answered cryptically as she took off her coat and hung it on a nearby rack. The matter-of-fact way she carried herself even as water pooled on the floor under her had Ruby for a loop.

“You crazy.”

There was a soft chuckle, amused but not without a little spite. “That’s a softball coming from you.”

“What?”

“Are you coming back?”

The last question was asked with her back turned. Ruby couldn’t see her expression but there was that catch in her voice again. An altogether odd tone that didn’t belong to the situation or the manner with which they last left things.

Ruby was reminded that she was still angry but it was a hollow kind of emotion now, directionless. “Why should I?”

“If you do, I’m going to teach you a spell to protect yourself.” It was not a hypothetical.

“What? Why?”

“I taught the same spell to that dear cousin of mine,” Christina replied with signaled irony, leaving Ruby to wonder whether the gesture was special or not special. “Why not you?”

“I mean, why now? You’ve never felt the need to before.” Her skin, the color and proximity of it, was often protection enough. To Ruby’s utter shame.

“Would you believe me if I told you I feel the need to now?” Christina asked with surprising earnestness.

It reminded Ruby of Leti’s when she was trying to convince her she’d changed, that she wanted a real connection. She drew up. “Why?” Their conversation from earlier came back to haunt her. “Because of Emmett Till?”

“No, I told you I don’t care about that.”

“You’ve got some nerve.” The familiar testiness she always felt around the blonde returned. Her apathy was incomprehensible. She wished to rage, to scream at her, smash something down. Hear it all shatter into pieces but for this deathly void. Did she really feel nothing?

“Would you believe me if I told you I would not want to see you in harm’s way?”

“No. The first time William – shit, y _ou_ – slept with me, you asked me to go after a police captain. So, no, I don’t fucking believe that for a moment.”

Christina sighed. “Fine,” she said with infinite patience though there was nothing condescending about her tone. Her shoulders looked small. She turned her head as though to look at a view. But there was nothing but the staircase and the darkened hallway leading to the solitude of her room.

It took Ruby another moment to finally recognize it. (She thought her unreachable.)

“Would you believe me if I told you that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do if you asked me?”

“Again, why should I believe you?”

Christina met her gaze then. There was a fierceness to her look, like a child’s really, open and terrible in its honesty. “Just ask me, Ruby. What have you got to lose?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> As the text says, title comes from "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" as performed by Ella Fitzgerald.


End file.
